In a charmingly animated video, Lucas Gray, one of the artists behind the Simpsons and Family Guy illustrates why, with words from President Obama, trickle down economics is a failed experiment.

Here’s the video:

Trickle down economics, supply side economics; both code for social engineering or wealth redistribution. The goal is to concentrate wealth in the hands of the already wealthy.

Trickle down economics is a deliberate attempt at not just directly lining the pockets of the wealthy, but of taking money out of the pockets of the majority of tax payers. If you think for one moment that a broke government is an accidental byproduct of trickle down, you’d be wrong.

Advocates of trickle down are largely followers of economists trained by the Austrian or Chicago School of Economics. In a very simple nutshell, the goal is to make the government so broke it can no longer sustain itself and it will be forced to sell, literally. Every single government service, including the military, schools, trash collection, prisons and even tax enforcement will be auctioned like Great Grandma’s jewelry. Social Security will be put into the stock market and some services, like police and fire protection, will be provided only to people who can afford to pay. Some, like prison, will be provided to people who can’t afford to pay. The rich will continue to get richer. Average pay scales will be driven down and the poor will get very much poorer.

Advocates of trickle down often cite the economic “successes” of the brutal Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Under Pinochet’s rule, the rich did get richer and overall, the country got richer, but on the backs of the working class. Wages fell. The poor got dramatically poorer and the inevitable civil unrest was controlled with mass imprisonment, torture and even murder. At one point, nearly 35% of the country was unemployed.

It is the increased wealth of the élite that we see the true “miracle” of Chile. According to one expert in the Latin American neo-liberal revolutions, the élite “had become massively wealthy under Pinochet” and when the leader of the Christian Democratic Party returned from exile in 1989 he said that economic growth that benefited the top 10 per cent of the population had been achieved (Pinochet’s official institutions agreed). [Duncan Green, The Silent Revolution, p. 216, Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 231] Thus the wealth created by the relatively high economic growth Chile experienced in the mid to late 1980s did not“trickle down” to the working class (as claimed would happen by “free market” capitalist dogma) but instead accumulated in the hands of the rich.

For example, in the last years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the richest 10 percent of the rural population saw their income rise by 90 per cent between 1987 and 1990. The share of the poorest 25 per cent fell from 11 per cent to 7 per cent. [Duncan Green, Op. Cit., p. 108] The legacy of Pinochet’s social inequality could still be found in 1993, with a two-tier health care system within which infant mortality is 7 per 1000 births for the richest fifth of the population and 40 per 1000 for the poorest 20 per cent. [Ibid., p. 101]

Per capita consumption fell by 23% from 1972-87. The proportion of the population below the poverty line (the minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20% to 44.4% from 1970 to 1987. Per capita health care spending was more than halved from 1973 to 1985, setting off explosive growth in poverty-related diseases such as typhoid, diabetes and viral hepatitis. On the other hand, while consumption for the poorest 20% of the population of Santiago dropped by 30%, it rose by 15% for the richest 20%. [Noam Chomsky, Year 501, pp. 190-191]

A bit closer to home, our very own country has proven the inherent inequalities in trickle down economics. Bill Willers writes,

Corporate America has spent billions lobbying for deregulation of its activities and for privatization of everything from the health system to education to national parks and forests to Social Security – a situation that would lead to ownership and control by the corporate sector and a tiny handful of the super rich of virtually every aspect of society.

With no cash in the federal till – due to massive tax cuts along with huge deficits, and ultimate inability of the government to borrow further – there would no longer be much to argue about. The corporate sector would win by default, so that everything needed by the masses would have to be obtained through them at any price they would want to charge.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the man who coined the term, “The great American experiment,” famously said, “the surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.”

Under trickle down, our aristocratic colors have more than broken through, they have overtaken our veneer of populism. Perhaps it’s time to apply another coat or two of democracy and vote out the advocates of supply side.

Author: Wendy GittlesonPolitical pundit, small business marketing guru, business blogger -- a true renaissance woman, which apparently makes her really old.
By the way, did you know that every time someone mentions impeaching Trump (or shares one of Wendy's articles), an angel gets its wings?
Follow Wendy on Twitter or Google Plus.